Modern electronic designs often include various library cells such as some off-the-shelf use configurable or non-configurable intellectual property (IP) cells, macro cells, etc. to save development efforts and to expedite the design cycles so as to shorten the time-to-market of the eventual products. In addition, a certain portion such as a cell or a block of circuit components of an electronic design is often replicated by using cloning techniques to identify or generate multiple instances or copies that are identical to or similar to the portion in the electronic design. Replication of a portion of an electronic design or cloning the portion of the electronic design may include the first process that generates one or more exact replications or clones of the portion in one or more other areas of the electronic design. Replication of a portion of an electronic design or cloning the portion of the electronic design may also include the second process that generates one or more mutants of the portion in one or more areas of the electronic design. Conventional approaches for cloning utilize connectivity search processes to identity clone targets or mutant targets.
There are basically four issues with the conventional connectivity search processes. The first issue is that connectivity search processes are slow, especially when the design size or complexity increases. One purpose of a connectivity search process is to find target sub-graphs (e.g., a set of schematic devices) similar to the clone source sub-graph. These conventional search processes rely only on the device connectivity. Both the conventional clone and mutant connectivity search processes are known to be slow, especially when the size or complexity of the sub-graph and the size or complexity of the whole graph grow. The second issue is that the quality of the results is low for some clone topologies. The third issue is that the quality of result is often low for conventional mutant connectivity searches. The fourth issue is that search processes may only perform on a set of connected devices.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and a system for implementing electronic designs with cloning techniques without having the aforementioned issues, disadvantages, or problems.